Metrolink F59PHI 880 pauses with Orange County Line train 688 at the Fullerton, Calif., station at 5:39 p.m., on August 7, 1998. The Los Angeles commuter rail system has grown dramatically since its 1992 startup. George Fletcher Metrolink, the working name of the Southern California Regional Rail Authority, operates commuter service in the Los Angeles […]
Ann Arbor RS1 No. 20 unloads freight cars off the Lake Michigan carferry Arthur K. Atkinson at Frankfort, Mich., in April 1982, the railroad’s last year of carferry operation. Forrest L. Becht For over 100 years, trains and ships were partners in serving the eastern and western shores of Lake Michigan. This unique form of […]
The year was 1966; I was 19 years old and starting my second summer working on the Great Lakes. This year I was called to be a deckhand on the Leon Falk Jr. of the Hanna fleet. At 730 feet overall, she was one of the largest boats on the Great Lakes, and could haul […]
Merger? What merger? Two tariffs equal one trip By J. David Ingles As railroad mergers were sweeping the land through the 1960’s, passenger services of individual carriers were on a one-way trip to oblivion, culminating in Amtrak’s formation in 1971. For most roads, this couldn’t happen soon enough, and this attitude, couple with the regulatory […]
Many of us didn’t want to believe that the steam era was drawing to a close — that diesels, those cousins of the automobile with their garish tin shrouds, were winning the battle over the noble iron horse — until a dreary Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1953. After that, we could no longer […]
In the small town of Goshen, Ind., where I grew up, one was always aware of the New York Central. Goshen was astride the New York-Chicago main line, so the railroad was not only a key to the city’s economy but also part of its very consciousness. For my own generation of high school boys […]
All the high excitement, thrills and tensions of railway experience are not the exclusive province of the operating department employees. Many a trackman, carman, and other railway workers have anxieties and thrills in the course of performing their daily tasks. As superintendent of motive power, I had my share of pressing situations that extended a […]
We have nothing special planned for June 6, 1957 — the 13th anniversary of the D-Day invasion — but it turns out to be a memorable day for the Daily family. My dad is an engineer on the Nickel Plate Road working out of Frankfort, Ind. I am a 22-year-old, newly promoted engineer on the […]
At 1:45 p.m. on a sunny spring afternoon in 1955, the pace of activity at the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy depot in Brookfield, Mo., quickened. Due at 1:57 was train 36, the Chicago-bound Kansas City Zephyr — a streamliner led by two sliver E8’s. Automobiles began arriving and discharging passengers and their baggage. Station personnel […]
My father, Richard Henderson, was employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a shop clerk in the motive-power department at Toledo, Ohio, from 1901 through 1955. He told me the following story, and I will never forget it. During World War II, troop trains were given rights over virtually every other train on the road. Such […]
